Dying Man in a Yellow Suit

 

October, you are a dying man

wearing a yellow suit

voguing down the boulevard

pretending that cane is just a prop.

Step inside the boulangerie.

Sugar melts, cakes grow stale,

but being in the case is like being on stage--

it's "let's pretend" in the sweetest way.

Summer hasn't been kind to us.

There is chewing gum on our soles,

our skin is a disaster, our regrets numberless,

yet we reflect in store windows as clearly as royals.

October, offer me your arm and no one will know

that you are not just being gallant.

With each step, another day ticks away

and when you lie down with me it will be as a near-ghost.

No matter, don't give it another thought.

I am here, once almost-pretty,

my spirit a genuine drop dead knock-out babe

and all yours until November arrives

in its ferryboat, and if you brought no coin

I've got you, allow me, you with the kindly moon in your eyes.

______

for my dear friend Dora at Dverse Poetics: Tripping the October Light Fantastic

2 New Short Poems

IN THE TIME OF SHORTENING DAYS

The crickets have come

to sing summer out,

smooth black invisible chirring

like planets spinning.

I have fed the little rat

who tips the tray--

each of us awake in differing skins,

on a yellow-leaf evening

under white stars

_________________

EMAIL FROM MY BROTHER

Hearing from you is like being operated on

by a blind doctor

trained in church

by the deaf dead.

_________ 

The Death of November

 

November has died, of a fever, in bed

under gray blankets made of wind and dusk.

I had called out to it before, full of a strange joy,

saying, 

                   see how the maples and pear trees

                   send their red-haired daughters down

                   like roses from the pale hands of virgins

to lie at the feet of autumn's wounded matador.

November has died, and must be sewn into

 a snow-shroud to be carried by somber hearse

past the last of the violets by the garden wall,

still living

                        like children up past their bedtimes,

                        wearing brocade vests, leather shoes

                       and shirts with sleeves of brilliant green

waiting for the west to swallow their parents, and their pasts.

November has died, and the shade has been drawn.

A new lodger arrives, talking too loudly, eyes as bright

as polished coins, holding a glazed sweet in one hand

raised up

                         as if it were a goblet full of honey, taking no

                         notice of the widows with their black mantillas

                         wrapping the last cornbread cake in a cloth,

for the sad mongrel who lies down on November's chilly grave.

______________-

Word Garden Word List--Autumn

 

Hello my darlings, all arrayed in red and gold! If you're like me, then this week's prompt will be right up your alley. I love Autumn! And so, our source this time is the Autumn section of The Four Seasons, a pocket poets collection that is part of the Everyman's Library. 

This section includes work by such marvelous poets as Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Amy Lowell. Here is Lowell's poem "Autumn":

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver. 

Now a poem with the same title by Walter de la Mare:

There is a wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where sweet grass was;

   And clouds like sheep

   Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was.

Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

   But phantom, forlorn,

   Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

   And ever with me,

   Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.

It occurs to me, dear poet friends, that the prompts I find around tend to be topical. Personally, I favor the traditional major themes of poetry: love, mortality, and nature. Surely there is no better time to contemplate these than now, as autumn begins. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem of our own. (Your poem need not be about Autumn at all, but you'll get a nod of approval from your humble prompt mistress if it is!) Then just link up, visit others, and then spend some time out of doors, savoring the change of the seasons. 

And now, your List:

enchanting

ferry

fluttering

forgotten

grackles

mixed

phantom

pheasant

poetry

poppies

quiet

remembers

scatters

scent

smoke

vine

walnut

wasp

web

yellow

Un Recuerdo (A Memory)

 

When I was younger, one of my co-workers

was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.

She was just always there,

a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--

some sort of salad. 

She was just an ample, 

stationary emplacement 

as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin

to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties

still rumbling around Havana,

something you'd smile at

but not feel had anything to do with you.

She wore a cross that rested on her bosom,

like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis. 

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.

"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce. 

I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.

What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather

blood and bone and breath

breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.

There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,

just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.

British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs

in grainy archive footage

as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing. 

"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered. 

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.

I still think of that day at the hospice, though

and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,

like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,

at that wind-down hour.

He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,

but though we protest that we were only in the middle, 

I want to see how it ends

he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,

"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Dunn. 

The last line says, "Nothing is forever, not even suffering." 

Music: Compay Segundo Chan Chan

Shift

 

Mid-August, the weather patterns change,

but slowly,

like something forgotten in the fridge;

the holy

turning secular, then profane.

We had our own world, you and I,

a beautiful in-joke

but, behind your back as I looked at you,

a green-screen took

over and spoiled it with the whisper of a lie.

All summer, verdant leaves and cool shade

were hiding

the dying brown when the sugar stops flowing.

I'm finding

endings gorgeous, and terrible, like the love we almost made. 

_______

for Sunday Muse #230.

Music: Jennifer Warnes "Pretending To Care" (written by Todd Rundgren)

Attraction

 WordCrafter word list: Property/ Bizarre / Mercury / Melancholy / Indigo / Light / Languish / Purity / Thirst

Purity may be found

secreted behind that borrowed rib

a little southwest of the heart.

It uses serrated light

from the #39 bus,

its lit numbers visible only to those bleeding.

Mercury stepped on your kindness

and pawned his pride

for three dollars and a rolled bandage.

Melancholy Jane saw it all,

handed the driver a bible

full of indigo blues and lighter fluid,

Said, "Home, James,"

in your voice she had recorded under her tongue

like a password.

I hid purity in my messenger bag,

an inherited property, a ball and chain

made from beer tabs and lipstick.

All I want now is to languish famously,

pull poems out of top hats

and remember the bizarre attraction

you keep by the roadside

for marks and suckers

you turn to perfection on the wheel of your kiss.

_______

You

 

I have a confession to make,

an obvious thing, like a cardinal perched on the back of a white Adirondack chair.

There's a hint of smoke on the air,

slight yet insistent as I still imagine your body to be,

not altered by time,

even as my boots kick leaves gone strangers to the trees.

I still think of you,

no matter the closing door of my words.

A neighbor's burn barrel glows in the dusk

giving only the notion of warmth, across the yards.

The truth is, I burn down for you sometimes, even now.

I blaze, bend, lose cohesion and fall to ash.

Something reminds me of your face,

your October hair,

your old desire,

and I fall,

red and solitary as a maple leaf,

silent but still in love with you.

______

for Sunday Muse #133.

Charon's Obol

November sun is June's grown older.
It makes its nest in my eyes, no brim on my hat.
My dog trots through leaves the color of rusty wheel wells
as the light goes low like melting butterfat.

I will stay with him as he will stay with me,
each of us faithful, finite and flesh-fragile
until the dusk-time when we both sleep at last,
he with his red collar, and in my hand his leash and Charon's obol.
_______

for Sunday Muse #83.

Charon is the ferryman who demands a coin, or obol, for passage from this life to the next.

The Walnut Leaves, In Their Terror

The walnut leaves fall in groups,
In fear of
Zacky Peanut, who brooks no nonsense
And is ferocious (but fair.)

Into their bags they go,
Silent siblings to the sticks
Also lately fallen.

She who has a dog
Need never fear walnut leaves
For he is a Good Boi
And always at the ready.
_____

for Real Toads.

Garden Bells

September rings its
garden bells
when the year picks up its skirts
to run.

Some mornings
it has rained,
and others, the sky is
that impossible autumn blue. 

I wish I knew
why, even in sobriety,
even in maturity,
I am September's motherless child.

Before long, perhaps,
It will no longer matter
about the ache of wet leaf mornings
and impossible autumn blue.
______